I get out of bed. I walk through the dimly lit hallway, thinking of what’s in my fridge and what I should have for breakfast. With no real effort, I’ve navigated my environment, accessed my memory, and assessed the energetic state of my body, all in the space of a few seconds. How is the brain able to do this? Partly by harnessing electricity. The brain spends about half of its energetic… Source I get out of bed. I walk through the dimly lit hallway, thinking of what’s in my fridge an...

France had 30,626,300 people in work at the end of June 2026, while ILO unemployment climbed to 8.3%. This page tracks employment in France statistics from INSEE, Dares and Eurostat releases published between July and September 2026: jobs by sector, age and contract, the jobless rate, base pay and France’s position within the EU. Employment in France Statistics 30.63M people in employment, end of Q2 2026 8.3% ILO unemployment rate, Q2 2026 +119,500 non-salaried workers added in the...

0.0 Context setting Thursday 29 September in Portland, Oregon, where it is dreary but also not raining. Dreary kind of implies rain? Some sort of pregnantly dreary, I suppose. Gravid with rain but not raining yet. Anticipatory. It’s been just over a week since the last episode and I’ve got to say that every day that I haven’t written I’ve gotten more anxious about not having written. This is not generally speaking helpful because I don’t know about you, but it’s easier to writ...

I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging...

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ...

The Quay, Olaveaga, Bilbao by Luis Paret y Alcazar, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but a more involved piece about how the AI that power...

It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”: human-AI partnerships that were stronger than unassisted AIs or humans. Lots of people think that we’re currently in a world of software engineering centaurs. According to them, coding AIs are not yet capable enough to...

Like many programmers, I find Alexis King's Parse, don't validate article fascinating, because it gives a name to an idiom that seems familiar and important - one I've observed and used in the past without naming it explicitly. This post is a review of the "Parse, don't validate" pattern applied to the Rust programming language (the original post uses Haskell). I was particularly interested in finding educational examples of this pattern in the Rust standard library and other well-known projec...

Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the principles that follow from that idea — control over the rate of knowledge exposition, tight coupling between slides and speaker, minimalism by default, visuals that say more than words can, and never sending your slides out in advance. more… Not every present...

Our software represents strings using the UTF-16 or the UTF-8 formats. Most text on the web is UTF-8, but Java, C# or JavaScript represents the strings as UTF-16 to the programmer. Sometimes we need to transcode (convert) strings. Your browser probably uses the simdutf library for validating or transcoding. It is part of the widely used V8 JavaScript engine. Up until a few days ago, the simdutf library missed one key feature: if the UTF-8 input is invalid, it did not know how to transcode it...

I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-) Welcome to the September edition of Interesting Links in the Data and AI World . It’s a bumper edition (aren’t they always), with lots and lots about Kafka and related technologies in particular this month. Oh, and AI. Obvs. I’m going to try to avoid falling into the trap of making a bad pun about the season…damnit! ;-) Welcome to the September edition of Interestin...

The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 21, I chat with Joel , the author of joelchrono.xyz about, among other things, writing about video games, weeknotes, homepage and website design, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Joel joelchrono.xyz The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also ...

Our Moon as imaged by the Galileo spacecraft flying past it on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Many people think that the Moon is just a gray ball of rock in our sky. Surprisingly, many scientists seem to share this notion. I once had a physicist tell me the Moon is scientifically boring. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. So I wrote this article to summarize the immense scientific and exploratory value of Earth’s cosmic companion. Firstly, consider that the bootprints of Apollo astrona...

The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... ... Read More Read More

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love . It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still hav...

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted softw...

Today marks a year since my little sister, Lisa, took her own life. She was 34. It was an overdose, but we don't know if it was an accident or suicide. We’ll never get an answer, yet I lean toward believing it was by choice. As grim as it sounds, picturing her with some control over the end brings me a small measure of peace. I still think about her every day, and I still get upset regularly. Especially when I've been to visit my nephew and I see the sadness in his eyes. At first I was a...

We went to a coffee roaster recently that had one of those Fellow Espresso Series 1 coffee machines on display. I’d only seen this on James Hoffman’s review , so I was surprised at how big it was. It was wider than my 13-inch MacBook Air, and much deeper. James mentions the size, but it’s a different experience entirely seeing it in person. It reminded me of when I got my first Sun Ray box at uni in the 2000s, and how I thought it was even smaller in person than I expected. Or thi...

Serde is an amazing serialization library for Rust and it has been a huge reason why I felt productive with it for years. However already while at Sentry I got quite frustrated with some of the limitations with it but actually replacing Serde is tricky because of the might that it has in the ecosystem. Also because it’s quite hard to actually do better without also making some potentially painful compromises. Here are three examples of Serde corner cases that show poor interactions of Ser...

Listen I understand that technically I am capable of wearing a sweater at anytime but that’s not what I mean and you know it I can’t wear a sweater right this minute because it’s the hottest part of the day and the hottest part of the day is still a little too hot for sweater. But morning? Evening? SWEATER TIME.  Also I’ve never really thought about the word sweater before and is it the word we used because this is an item of clothing that makes you sweat, hypotheti...

The STOC conference (and likely others) are requiring that a submission says how much AI was used. I can imagine the following options: 1) AI was used for proofreading and tightening prose (I think in this case you do not need to disclose). 2) AI was used to shorten the proofs. 3) I came up with the questions but AI supplied all of the answers.  However, I have read it and take responsibility for the content. 4) AI came up with the questions and AI supplied all of the answers.  However, I have...

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might...

I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, making floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. In this article, I look at the algorithm behind the chip's tangent instruction. One popular approach for trigonometric functions is an algorithm called CORDIC. Another approach is a polynomial approximation. The 8087 combined the two to obtain both high accuracy and high performa...